Destiny | Page 3

personal appearance. If you so
much as squint at me after school today I intend to change the general
appearance of your face. It won't be handsome when I get through, but
I guess it will be an improvement, at that.
"Respectfully,
"Paul Burton."
The coerced writer groaned deeply as he scrawled the signature which
pledged him so irretrievably to battle. He felt that his autograph to such
a missive was distinctly inappropriate, and invited sure calamity. Ham,
however, only nodded approval as he commanded, "When you take the
bucket up, lay that on his desk and be sure he gets it."
Yet as Paul plodded on, a piteous little shape of quaking terror, Ham let
the glance of militant tenderness flash once more into his eyes, and his
voice came in sympathetic timbre.
"Paul, I can't always do your fightin' for you. If I could I wouldn't make
you do it--but you've got to learn how to stand on your own legs. It ain't
only the Marquess kid you're fightin'. You've got to lick the yeller
streak out of yourself before it ruins you." He paused, then
magnanimously added, "If you trim him down good and proper, I'll get
you a new violin string in place of the one you busted."
It was a very unmilitary shape that huddled in its seat, watching his
adversary read the ultimatum. As for the heir of the house of Marquess,
he allowed his freckled face for a moment to pucker in blank
astonishment, then a smile of beatitude enveloped it. It was such
beatitude as might appear on the visage of a cat who has unexpectedly
received a challenge to mortal combat from a mouse.
An hour of the afternoon session yet intervened between the present
and the awful future and upon Paul Burton it rested with its incubus of
dire suspense. It was an hour which the Marquess kid employed
congenially across the aisle. Whenever the tired eyes of the teacher

were not upon him he gave elaborate pantomimes wherein he felt the
swelling biceps of his right arm, and made as if to spit belligerently
upon his doubled fist. Sometimes his left hand seemed struggling to
restrain the deadly right, lest it leap forth untimely in its hunger for
smiting. These wordless pleasantries were in no wise lost on the
shrinking Paul in whose slight body slept the spirit of the artist
unfortified with martial iron of combat.
The world of boyhood has little understanding or sympathy for a soul
like Paul's; a soul woven of dreams and harmonies which knows no
means of attuning itself to the material. This lad walked with his head
in the clouds and his thoughts in visions. His playmates were invisible
to human eyes and he heard the crashing of vast symphonies where
others felt only the silences. Now in a little while he was to have his
face punched by a material and normal young savage whose very
freckles shone with anticipation.
Ham Burton, looking on from his desk, recognized that in the frail lad
who "wouldn't stick up for himself" burned the thin hot fire of genius
without the stamina that alone could fan it into effective blaze. For
Ham, whose face revealed as little of what went on back of his eyes as
an Indian's, was the dreamer, too, though his dreams were cut to a
different pattern. As he dealt in visions, so William the Conqueror may
have dealt when a boy in his father's bakeshop; so Napoleon may have
dreamed before the world had heard his name. The younger lad
dreamed as the hasheesh-eater, for the vague and iridescent glory of
visioning, but the elder dreamed otherwise, in preface to achievement.
The teacher rose at length to dismiss the classes, and as the children
piled out into the crisp air, the Marquess kid was first on the
hard-trodden soil of the school-yard--for there triumph awaited his
coming. Paul was less impulsive. He collected his books with the most
deliberate care, dusting them off with an unwonted solicitude. Then he
spent an indefinite period searching for a stub of slate-pencil, which at
another time would not have interested him. He hoped against hope that
Jimmy Marquess would not have time to wait for him.
At last, the laggard in war felt Ham's strong hand on his coat-collar.

Vainly protesting and sniffling, he was hustled toward the rotting
threshold and catapulted upon his enemy so abruptly and skillfully that
to the casual eye he might have seemed bursting with impatience for
battle.
And as he stumbled, willy-nilly, upon the Marquess kid, the Marquess
kid joyously gathered him in and began raining enthusiastic rights and
lefts upon the blanched and blue-veined face.
Suddenly Paul Burton woke to the fact that at his back was